Biden is favored to win the election

The second presidential debate, originally scheduled for Oct. 15, is now postponed to Oct. 22 because of President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis, but that hasn’t stopped him from floating the possibility of hosting a rally this weekend. We’ve started to get polls on what the public thinks of Trump’s diagnosis, and so far Americans, including some Republicans, say Trump didn’t take enough precautions. There are also signs that the episode may be hurting Trump’s reelection chances. Now, not every pollster has shown an uptick for Biden since we learned about Trump’s diagnosis last Friday, but Biden still got some of his best polls this week. We’ll continue to monitor polls for evidence of how Trump’s diagnosis has affected both the election and Americans’ views of the coronavirus.

• The voting has already started in the 2020 election, but there’s a real possibility that come Election Day we won’t know who won the presidency right away. Depending on how things unfold, there are a variety of nightmare scenarios where the election is contested. As FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone writes, this has, of course, happened before, with the 2000 presidential election as the most recent example, but there’s reason to believe that if it happens again this year, it would be much worse for our democracy than the 2000 case was.
• On Wednesday, we launched our House forecast, the last election forecast we’re launching this year. The outlook is particularly good for Democrats. All three versions of our forecast more or less agree that Democrats will maintain control of the House — and maybe even pick up a few seats.